MATTHEW'S GOSPEL
MATTHEW’S GOSPEL
I wish to speak at this time, as you will understand from what I have read, about Matthew’s gospel. Matthew was one of the apostles and was used to write this gospel. Like the other apostles, his name is in the foundations of the heavenly city which are adorned with every precious stone; so that the apostles are outstanding men. They are superlative in value. Peter was one, of course, and he uses the word ‘precious’ in a very significant way. Undoubtedly he had learned from the Lord how precious he was and how precious the other eleven apostles were. The devil would spoil them; the Lord told Peter that Satan had desired to have them to sift him as wheat, meaning that he would show there was not much of value in him after all. The test would be severe. The pronoun there is not ‘thee’ but ‘you’, which is plural; that is, it would imply that he would put the twelve of them through the high test that he had in mind, to bring out that they were not just what they seemed to be or what the Lord said or implied they were. But the Lord says, “I have prayed for thee”, Luke 22:32 using the singular, knowing that the pressure against Peter would be especially severe. The Lord told Peter, too, later, “When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst where thou desiredst” John 21:18 meaning that when he was a young man he did what he willed, like most young people. He went where he would and did what he would; but the Lord says, You will improve. The preciousness will be there, fully; you will improve; age will help you. I would say that to all of you young people here: age will help you if you are sincere. It will not help you otherwise. One may be converted and seem to make a good start, but the devil decoys him into the world, and age [p. 294] then does not do him any good, but the contrary; the older ones become the worst. It is very solemn. But the Lord showed that in Peter’s case it would be different, he would increase in value with age. I want to do that; I want to increase in value. The Lord has put a value on every one of us, indeed the book of Leviticus puts a value on us as christians; we are all valued. So the Lord said to Peter, You will increase in value with age, as you grow older; I mean He said that in effect, because He said, “When thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and bring thee where thou dost not desire”, John 21:18. That is, he would be wholly resigned to the will of God. The will of God is prevailing even among the nations; God is having a certain advantage with them, and it is a great time for christians to learn to do the will of God. As James says to a man who would like to make money, You go to another town and make money there — like the Jews at the present time who make money fast even if they have to go to another town or another country to do it. But James says, “If the Lord should so will” James 4:15. I will do so-and-so, that is, it is a question of the will of God and not of money-making with us.
So as to Peter the Lord said, “When thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee”, John 21:18. And I say to you young people, the older you become, the more serious you become — I mean, normally — and presently the time of departing to be with the Lord is coming, either by translation or death. It is imminent, and becomes more and more real, so that you are more disposed to be resigned to the will of God.
Now Matthew has all this in mind. He is one of the precious stones and doubtless he is precious in the sense of gathering up the Lord’s mind about the assembly. He is the only apostle, the only evangelistic [p. 295] writer, who speaks about the assembly formally, and I have no doubt that the Lord especially values Matthew because he did write about the assembly. Matthew came into the Lord’s mind as one who would write about that which He loved most and best. The most beautiful thing in the whole realm of the universe, of the creation, is the assembly, outside of divine Persons of course. They are not things, They are Persons, but the assembly is a thing and it is the most beautiful. It is composed of persons of course, but it is nevertheless a thing though presented as a peculiarly substantial thing — perfectly so, indeed, and measured. It is measured in the sense of being a cube, showing that it is substantial. It is not unreal; there is nothing imaginary about it; it is a substantial thing to be known as such. So the Lord undoubtedly regarded Matthew peculiarly because he was to write about the assembly; he writes about it in a certain chapter especially but all the gospel bears on that great subject. That is the theme, the trend of it — it all bears on the assembly.
This leads me to another point that I have in mind, and that is that the masculine side is greatly stressed in Matthew. The stressing of it is seen in the history of our Lord as born into this world, and the facts as to His mother and His father, His father by reputation that is, Joseph. God is His Father, of course, but Joseph was His father because he was the husband of Mary; He is called the Lord’s father in that sense, conveniently so; and he is made more of in Matthew than in Luke or in Mark, all by design, and all in accord with what is divinely done, the cause not far to seek. Hence we have in Matthew, “Book of the generation of Jesus Christ” Matthew 1:1; not those that were born of Him, that were descendants of His, but it is put in this way — that the generation is His. One person in it is Abraham,
but it is not Abraham’s generation. In Genesis there are ten generations given to us and we might have expected Abraham’s to be given, but it is not; the greatest man in Genesis is Abraham, but his generation is not given. Adam’s is given; Noah’s is given, and those of others, but not Abraham’s. Can we doubt that the Spirit with beautiful design and instinct omitted Abraham from the list of those whose generations were given, for the reason that he was to be directly in the line of the Messiah? He saw Him. Could Abraham wish to have his own generation portrayed in the presence of the fact that he saw the Messiah? And he rejoiced to see Him: “Abraham exulted in that he should see my day, and he saw and rejoiced”, John 8:56. He would, as it were, hide in that holy presence of the Lord Jesus Christ, and as Matthew serves to give us the generation of that Person, Christ is first mentioned. It is, “the generation of Jesus Christ”, Matthew 1:1 not Isaac, not Abraham, not Jacob, not David, but Jesus Christ. He must be the First in that sense. So we have no generation of Abraham given in Genesis; in truth he is the heavenly man, and that is what one had in mind.
So I have read this passage because it speaks of sons. It is an outstanding passage in Matthew in that it speaks of sons; not children. We had it today that John speaks much of children. Matthew speaks about the Lord Jesus as a little Child with His mother; about nine times in the first and second chapters we have the little Child mentioned, not the Babe. Luke speaks about the Babe, but Matthew speaks about the little Child. Many other passages, as we had today, speak about and present the idea of children. The word ‘child’ is common gender, it may be male or female, but not so the word ‘sons’. John speaks much of children; Matthew speaks about sons. John hardly speaks of sons at all. He [p. 297] speaks of the Son of God of course; he must speak of Him, but as to ourselves he speaks of us as children exclusively, except in one passage. But Matthew speaks of sons in this particular passage, and that is why I read it, in order to bring out the masculine side and that it is worked out in sons or in sonship, and that it goes to heaven. Children do not go to heaven. I am speaking now of how Scripture speaks, and Scripture never says they go to heaven as children. Understand that when I say that I am not overlooking the fact that the Lord said of children, of little ones, that “their angels in the heavens continually behold the face of my Father who is in the heavens”, Matthew 18:10. I am not forgetting that. Who can tell anything about the vast number of children that go to heaven in the physical sense? We have to leave that with God, and not forget that the Lord spoke about the little ones saying, “Their angels in the heavens continually behold the face of my Father who is in the heavens”. It is the comfort of all mothers and fathers. But what I am speaking of is christianity. There are the children of the heathen and what not abroad in the world that God claims as His creatures; we have to leave that with God; He will do right with all such. But that does not touch at all what I am speaking of. I am speaking of christianity, and each christian who dies in the Lord goes to heaven as a son. The idea is going up, the masculine side is going up; the family side from the standpoint of children is down here. John says, “Beloved, now are we children of God, and what we shall be has not yet been manifested; we know that if it is manifested we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”, 1 John 3:2. That is masculine. I want to keep to that point now so that we may have in mind that the assembly is in a masculine setting. In itself it is feminine, it is always feminine in the sense of gender when it is spoken of [p. 298] as a person; for instance, the Lamb’s wife, the holy city, the heavenly city descending from God out of heaven adorned as a bride for her husband. That is feminine. But Matthew is viewing it from the administrative side, dear brethren; I want you to keep on that line for the moment, and that must be in the main masculine; not that the feminine is shut out, because the virtuous woman in Proverbs is a great administrator. She is a woman, but her husband is absent; yet he is known here, he is known in the gates, that is where judgment is carried on, where government is carried on as seen with Boaz. The masculine side is presented in him. There he was in the gate. The transaction as regards Ruth was in the gate of the city; it was an administrative matter and so Matthew is an administrative matter.
I am speaking tonight just because of that: that we might all see that we have part in this administrative matter, be we sisters or brothers. I need only to cite 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians and Ephesians to prove all this, and Revelation too; indeed the whole history of the testimony is the masculine and the feminine so that it is said that “God created Man in his image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”, Genesis 1:27. And He said to them, “Have dominion”, Genesis 1:26. He said it to both of them, so that the sisters and the brothers have to learn to have dominion; but there are things said about the sisters or about women, about the feminine side, that are intended to govern our minds as to the effect of femininity in this world. We cannot say that God could not do without it, But I would not say He could do without it; it is according to His purpose. The word ‘man’ covers both male and female, and God said, “Let them have dominion”. But in the third book of the Bible God said that when a man-child is born the mother has to be unclean for seven days and then for thirty-three days;
[p. 299] but when a woman-child is born the mother has to be unclean for two weeks — fourteen days — and afterwards sixty-six days. We could not work out from a physical point of view why this should be. There is nothing moral, of course, attached to the mother of a female child any more than to that of a male child, but God is speaking from His own point of view. He has a long outlook and He sees the effect here of the female and the effect of the male, and He shows us that the effect of the female here is morally more serious.
You may say, Why are you saying all that? One reason particularly is because woman is so exalted at the present time. Now let the dear sisters here not think I am saying one word derogatory to the female sex; I am not. I am only speaking from the word of God, and God shows us in what I quoted from Leviticus that much more serious consequences flow from the feminine side. If they do not know it they should know it now and think about it and control themselves, so as not to lend themselves to the spirit of this world. It is only in the assembly that you get the right thought about everything. Of course you get the right thoughts in the heavens, but as regards persons and things we can only get the right thought in the assembly. We get the truth about man and woman and children and about nations; we get the truth about all in the assembly. The all-various wisdom of God is seen there by the most exalted creatures; that is, the angels in heaven see all this. The all-various wisdom of God is portrayed and worked out in the assembly, and it is for sisters and brothers alike to see that they belong to that and to control themselves according to that, so that they can be used according to that. Think of the magnitude of what I am saying, and that you yourself belong to it as I do, thank God! But that is not all: the question is to be available to God for [p. 300] this great matter that He is working out at the present time. Matthew has this in mind, so that there we have a great deal about Joseph. Why should Matthew tell us more about Joseph than Luke does? Surely for a purpose; he is going to speak of the assembly not as the bride of Christ but as the great administrator of the universe presently; that she is to administer. So that the sisters too have to do with administration in the assembly now, and that is a most serious matter as to our conduct. We have had the matter of conduct before us today, that is, it works out in the idea of walk and education and affiliations and fellowship so that God should have something, should have material, workable material for the great purpose He has in hand. He is doing one thing at a time; other things are held in abeyance until the great matter is finished. So Paul puts himself forward as the completer of the word of God, and the completer of every man too, to present every man perfect in Christ; and he lays great stress in certain epistles, especially in Corinthians and Ephesians, on the female side. He stresses obedience, because without obedience in either male or female God has no material with which to work. He created the earth out of nothing, but not the assembly; He does not create that from nothing. He did not create Eve from nothing. He created Adam from clay, from dust, but He did not create Eve from dust; He created her from a part of Adam so that He might have something in the way of material for what He is doing. It is a question of the antitypes now for us. What is the potential part of the epistles but to bring out this very thing, to perfect the assembly, to make it useable for the purpose God has in mind.
Well, as I said, Matthew makes a great deal of Joseph, I mean relatively a great deal. The first thing he says of him is that he is a righteous man,
[p. 301] and he was righteous in regard of his wife. He was most careful, most sensitive, most tender in regard of her, exposed as she was. And then in chapter 2 he is entrusted with the mother and the Son, the little Child Jesus and His mother; they are both entrusted to Joseph. He takes the little Child to Egypt and God is there with Him, and when Archelaus died He sent Joseph back. Joseph knew enough to go back and he did go back; he was careful about his precious trust. That is what I am speaking about, the infinite preciousness of that trust; Joseph was such that God could trust him with such a precious commodity (I am speaking reverently of our Lord Jesus) and His mother, the little Child and His mother. If I speak to you about that dear little Child, that worshipful little Child — because in chapter 2 He is seen as worshipful — let us never forget that the Lord Jesus is to be worshipped. The wise men said, “We ... are come to worship him”, Matthew 2:1 let us never forget that; it is put down in the very beginning of Matthew and rightly in Matthew. It fits there. We have to learn to worship the Lord Jesus; let us never forget it. The wise men not only came to do it abstractly, but they brought things by which they could do it: myrrh and other precious things that could be used for the worship of the Lord Jesus. They had in their minds to worship the King; not the Child simply, but the King. If only a little child in appearance, in their minds He was a King; and so He was and ever will be an Object of worship.
So Matthew 1 and 2 furnishes all this and a good deal more on the same line: how little children from two years and under were taken account of by Herod and how his wicked murderous attack was all aimed at the Lord Jesus to murder Him. It is really wonderful that God should entrust Joseph with the Child in view of the terrible hatred of Herod and others against Him; the precious Child, that He [p. 302] should entrust Joseph with Him to carry Him to Egypt! It is a long way from Palestine to Egypt, and Jehovah the Father entrusted Joseph with this precious trust: the Lord Jesus Christ as a Babe whom the wise men, the magi from the east, regarded as the King of the Jews and whom they came to worship. One always dwells on those men with a peculiar restfulness. They came such a distance! What it must have cost them! One cannot say how many miles it was, but the east was the east; I would say it was probably in the neighbourhood of the Euphrates. They came that distance to worship the King of the Jews. There was no antipathy toward the Jews then; it was a question of the Lord Jesus, the Son of God. They came to worship Him, and they found Him; the star guided them to the place where the little Child was with His mother, and the heart rests there. Matthew presents that beautiful picture, and surely it is, dear brethren, written for us. Many saints after Pentecost never saw the gospel of Matthew; many of them died ere it was written; but we have it and all the epistles and gospels. The word of God is complete for us, dear brethren, and surely it is intended to complete us, to finish us. It is a finishing time with us, and the Lord is seeking to perfect us so that He may translate us to heaven for His pleasure.
Well now, I go on to chapter 17 because that is what I read, and I just wanted to show how sonship is stressed in it. The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews says, “For it became him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory ...”, Hebrews 2:10. That is my point, that He is bringing sons to glory. He is not bringing children to glory. It is the same Person but He is bringing sons to glory; it is just to impress us with that point that I now dwell for a short time on these verses. It is a chapter of great facts; it is the chapter of the transfiguration, Matthew’s presentation of the transfiguration. This point as to sonship is the last one in the chapter and it happened in Capernaum; Scripture not only says things, but they are said in certain places. Usually you get things said that will fit into certain places, because the places enhance or instruct as to the thing that is to be presented; this matter was in Capernaum. It says in Matthew 2 that the Lord Jesus went to Nazareth. He did not reside there exactly; He stayed there in relation to His parents, His reputed parents. He did come back to Nazareth according to Luke to preach the gospel, and a wonderful time they had there afterwards; but it is said in Matthew that Jesus left Nazareth and came to Capernaum and dwelt at Capernaum. I do not believe there is any place mentioned in the gospels that has that honour save Capernaum. Nazareth was not just the same, but He was there, as I said, because His parents took Him there first of all when they returned from Egypt, and He grew up there and was a carpenter there. But He went to Capernaum. It was by the water side but Nazareth was away up on the hills so that it was no question of a better climate; it was no matter of that, the Lord never thought of that. He went to Capernaum because it was to be a centre of testimony. He says of it, “And thou, Capernaum, who hast been raised up to heaven, shalt be brought down even to hades”, Matthew 11:23. Why? Because of the mighty works that were done there. The Lord Jesus did wonderful things there, and it was there that this incident happened. It was a miracle too, the catching of one fish with a line and hook and in that fish’s mouth was a stater, worth one dollar now according to the computation of persons that know. Peter had just met some persons who said to him, “Does your teacher not pay the didrachmas?”, Matthew 17:24. That was a simple incident,
[p. 304] because people usually did pay this tribute. It was a tax that was laid on Jews in those days called the temple tax. We are very well accustomed to taxes now, I need not say anything about that; it is a tax time. When someone said to Peter, “Does your teacher not pay the didrachmas?”, Peter says, Of course He does. That was in effect what he said. It says, “And when he came into the house, Jesus anticipated him, saying ...” (verse 25). Note it is when he comes into the house, because the Lord says, What I am going to say will have something to do with the family. He speaks about it to sons only; it is the great point in Matthew to bring out that the sons belong to the house regions. They go to glory; let us take it to heart and cherish it, that we do go to glory, and God is bringing us there; not simply lifting us there but bringing us there, bringing many sons to glory. He has made the Captain of our salvation perfect through sufferings.
Now Matthew in reporting on this is in keeping with the subject that the Lord gave him to write about. He gave Matthew his work and He gave all the apostles their work. He was the Superintendent of all these matters and He gave Matthew his work to do, and part of the work He gave him to do was to write this gospel. As I said in the beginning, he writes about the assembly and therefore the house must come into evidence. Let us not sit in the fields! You may say, It makes no difference; but it does. I could not speak to you as well out in the streets as I can here, because there are temple conditions here. It is not so out there.
And so it says, “And when he came into the house, Jesus anticipated him, saying, What dost thou think, Simon? the kings of the earth, from whom do they receive custom or tribute? from their own sons or from strangers?”. The Lord is saying in effect, I am going to speak to you about the family, and I [p. 305] want you to understand that the families are not taxable; they are not taxable. I am not to be taxed when I go into heaven, nor are any of us; we are immune. And so the Lord uses this parable, but it was in the house, notice. And He says to Peter, “What dost thou think, Simon? the kings of the earth, from whom do they receive custom or tribute? from their own sons or from strangers?”. The word ‘children’ in the Authorised Version should read ‘sons’; the original is ‘sons’, it is not the ordinary word for children. “Peter says to him, From strangers”. Well, that was right. And then what does the Lord say? As I said, it was in the house and the Lord is now speaking to us in the house; He is speaking to us as in assembly in a certain sense, and He is telling us that we all belong to the house. It is our place, not the field; Barnabas belonged to the family and he sold his fields and property and laid the money down at the apostles’ feet. He was a true Levite. And so the thought is that we belong to the house, to the enclosure, the house which belongs to the Lord, where He has rights and liberties, and He is saying to us that we belong to that. I want all you young people, and old people too, to take home, each to himself, that we belong to the house, not to the field. You may have to go into the field but your place properly is in the house, that is, the divine house. I have often thought that Capernaum was convenient to the Lord and it afforded Him an abode that He could call His own house. It was not His father’s house; it was not where Mary lived nor Joseph, nor his brethren; it was His own house. The Lord is speaking in this way to Peter when Peter came into the house; He waited until that time before He spoke to him about sons. He says to him, “Then are the sons free”. He is speaking in the house, in the divine enclosure, in the place where it should be spoken. It belongs to the ministry of the epistle to the [p. 306] Romans, and which Ephesians opens up to us. The house is a divine place, a divine enclosure, and things are said there that cannot be said elsewhere; therefore the Lord waited until Peter came into the house as to this question of who paid tribute and who did not pay tribute. And He says, You and I are sons. It is wonderful that He associated Himself with Peter in that sense! “Take that and give it to them for me and thee”. What did he give? Not the fish but the money that the fish brought. It was caught by Peter who was a fisherman. The Lord says to Peter, “Go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when thou hast opened its mouth thou wilt find a stater”. A stater is a piece of money in value about one dollar or five shillings, and it took that amount to pay the tax. He says to Peter, “Give it to them for me and thee”. He is announcing in the house that He and Peter were free from all taxation in a moral sense. We are under no tribute in a moral sense, we are free; the Lord says, “Then are the sons free”.
That is just the word I would leave with you all. If the Lord Jesus is free, we are all free. We are all sons of God, as the Scripture says, by faith in Christ Jesus. Paul says, “God has sent out the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”, Galatians 4:6. The Father will not tax us; the angels will not tax us. The man that washes his robes has a right to enter into the city, he is not taxed by the angels at the gates. And so it is for anyone who is not in fellowship here, it belongs to you if you are a christian, and there is no tax put on you. It is contrary to the rules and principles that govern the house of God. There is no tax. We are free in the house. The Lord says, “Then are the sons free”. That is all I had to say. May the Lord bless the word!